We’re improving DataFramed, and we need your help! We want to hear what you have to say about the show, and how we can make it more enjoyable for you—find out more here. We’re often caught chasing the dream of “self-serve” data—a place where data empowers stakeholders to answer their questions without a data expert at every turn. But what does it take to reach that point? How do you shape tools that empower teams to explore and act on data without the usual bottlenecks? And with the growing presence of natural language tools and AI, is true self-service within reach, or is there still more to the journey? Sameer Al-Sakran is the CEO at Metabase, a low-code self-service analytics company. Sameer has a background in both data science and data engineering so he's got a practitioner's perspective as well as executive insight. Previously, he was CTO at Expa and Blackjet, and the founder of SimpleHadoop and Adopilot. In the episode, Richie and Sameer explore self-serve analytics, the evolution of data tools, GenAI vs AI agents, semantic layers, the challenges of implementing self-serve analytics, the problem with data-driven culture, encouraging efficiency in data teams, the parallels between UX and data projects, exciting trends in analytics, and much more. Links Mentioned in the Show: MetabaseConnect with SameerArticles from Metabase on jargon, information budgets, analytics mistakes, and data model mistakesCourse: Introduction to Data CultureRelated Episode: Towards Self-Service Data Engineering with Taylor Brown, Co-Founder and COO at FivetranRewatch Sessions from RADAR: Forward Edition New to DataCamp? Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile appEmpower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business

Summary

Business Intelligence software is often cumbersome and requires specialized knowledge of the tools and data to be able to ask and answer questions about the state of the organization. Metabase is a tool built with the goal of making the act of discovering information and asking questions of an organizations data easy and self-service for non-technical users. In this episode the CEO of Metabase, Sameer Al-Sakran, discusses how and why the project got started, the ways that it can be used to build and share useful reports, some of the useful features planned for future releases, and how to get it set up to start using it in your environment.

Preamble

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Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? The current goal for most companies is to be “data driven”. How would you define that concept?

How does Metabase assist in that endeavor?

What is the ratio of users that take advantage of the GUI query builder as opposed to writing raw SQL?

What level of complexity is possible with the query builder?

What have you found to be the typical use cases for Metabase in the context of an organization? How do you manage scaling for large or complex queries? What was the motivation for using Clojure as the language for implementing Metabase? What is involved in adding support for a new data source? What are the differentiating features of Metabase that would lead someone to choose it for their organization? What have been the most challenging aspects of building and growing Metabase, both from a technical and business perspective? What do you have planned for the future of Metabase?

Contact Info

Sameer

salsakran on GitHub @sameer_alsakran on Twitter LinkedIn

Metabase

Website @metabase on Twitter metabase on GitHub

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Expa Metabase Blackjet Hadoop Imeem Maslow’s Hierarchy of Data Needs 2 Sided Marketplace Honeycomb Interview Excel Tableau Go-JEK Clojure React Python Scala JVM Redash How To Lie With Data Stripe Braintree Payments

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast